


Making Amends

by Rhinozilla



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Season 3, Rosemary McLeod shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 03:04:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7959943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mrs. McLeod wants to make amends with Daryl Dixon about everything that happened at Woodbury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Amends

The survivors from Woodbury and the group at the prison had been cohabitating for a month, and it was still jarring. They adjusted to the dank prison cells, the acrid smell of the air, the unfiltered view of the dead pressing at their perimeter, and the erasure of all comforting aesthetic. All of that could be swallowed without undue effort.

The jarring part came in seeing this prison group’s faces every day. Rosemary McLeod distinctly remembered Rick Grimes’s face, firing from the edge of the arena with cold precision. She remembered Michonne stalking through their streets like a caged animal. She remembered Tyreese and Sasha apprehensively learning the ways of Woodbury’s protection details. Suddenly, she saw Rick every day, tending to his crops in an unsteady attempt at tranquility. She saw Michonne tending to her horse and leaving first chance she got to hunt for the Governor. She saw Tyreese reluctantly working at the fences and Sasha comfortably settling into her leadership role on the Council.

The Governor had lied to them about these people. They weren’t savages or murderers. They were trying to survive, and the world had hardened them in ways that Woodbury hadn’t hardened her fellows. It was a shock, arriving at the prison after the Governor’s betrayal, to find, not barbaric felons chomping at the bit to torture them, but a band of scared and exhausted people.

Rosemary knew she wasn’t alone in feeling this way, this daily startle at seeing these people, because she saw the same tension, the same discomfort, in Daryl Dixon’s eyes every single time he saw her. She could tell that he remembered her from the arena…when she’d cheered for him and Merle to fight to the death. In that moment, before she knew the truth, she had wanted him to die, seen him as a rabid animal that needed to be put down instead of a human who maybe had a different story to tell. Same with Merle. She had no reason to question to the Governor, but that involuntary lip curl from Daryl made her feel ashamed of it every time.

In another life, they would have been able to avoid each other, like he so clearly wanted to, but the prison was small enough, and it shrank every time newcomers joined the community. To labor under the delusion that the two of them could simply not bump into each other was a load of lard. On top of that, it didn’t ease her mind any to see that he’d made peace with the others from the town. Seemed like it was just her that the redneck couldn’t reconcile with.

So when it was Sasha’s turn to take guard duty and relieve Daryl in the tower, Rosemary offered to do it instead. She was about damn near out of her mind listening to the other old codgers like herself swapping stories that she’d heard a thousand times over. Instead, she took a rifle and a bottle of Jim Beam that she’d hidden under her mattress at Woodbury and then made her way across the prison yard to the guard tower. Something told her that however this conversation went down, she’d want some alcohol after.

“Time to clock out,” she announced, stepping out of the stairwell onto the guard tower platform.

Dixon was lowering the binoculars, looking away from the area where a team was clearing the water hose in the creek. “Right,” was all the response she got.

“So." She didn’t remove herself from the doorway. “Since you’re off the clock now, boy, what you say we have a conversation like adults?”

He blinked at her, huffed, and reached for his crossbow, which he’d left propped against the wall. “I’ll pass.”

Rosemary shook her head. “Imma have to insist, because this avoidin’ each other thing is playground level shit. I like to think we’re both above that, huh?”

He looked at her flatly, appearing to weigh the idea, so she held up the bottle of whiskey.

“Hell, I even brought a mediator,” she chimed.

He snorted and left the crossbow alone, looking at her properly. “Fine.”

She handed the bottle over as a sign of goodwill and glanced out toward the team clearing the water hose. The three of them—Maggie, Glenn, and Carol—had made a right mess of themselves in the creek and weak mud of the banks, though their laughter at their muddy states carried up to the guard tower like bird song. You didn’t hear much laughter nowadays. Maybe from the children when you caught them in a light mood, but hardly ever from adults anymore.

Adults had seen too much shit. She side-eyed Dixon as he unscrewed the lid on the bottle. Adults had done too much shit too. Or been accessories to shit.

“Never got a chance to say,” she started, “I’m sorry about Merle. He was—“

Dixon appeared to find the label on the bottle extremely interesting, because he didn’t meet her eyes from the moment she started speaking. Rosemary chuckled and shook her head.

“He was a dick,” she finished.

The man coughed out an exhale of air and looked up at her finally. It was a start. She sure as Hell wasn’t going to shower this poor man with fake words of condolences over a brother that she had come to know in Woodbury as the biggest asshole that she’d ever met. It wasn’t in her. She had a feeling that everybody from Woodbury had already done that anyway, trying to get on Daryl’s good side or out of guilt at their indirect cause of his death. From what little she’d gleaned of Daryl Dixon indicated that, better or worse, he had some substance between his ears and probably saw through those fluffy condolences anyway. Playing nice was going to win her no favors here.

“That what you come up here for?” he prompted, taking a swig from the bottle and eying her.

“No.” She shook her head once, folding her arms. “I dragged my old bones out here because I’m sick of you looking at me like I’m dogshit that you’re tryin’a scrape off your heels.”

“ ‘Cause I don’t know how that feels?” He shot her a dangerous look.

“No, because you know exactly how that feels from about fifty different pairs of eyes, yet I’m the only one getting raked over the coals for it,” she countered.

“Ya’ll made me and my brother fight each other like animals,” he spat. “And that wasn’t entertainin’ enough so you threw walkers at us. Sorry if I ain’t exactly up for hugs.”

Rosemary snorted, “Good, because I don’t see a line waiting on hugs from your cranky ass.”

“Then what do you want? Forgiveness?”

“I want you to stop givin’ me the stink-eye every chance you get,” she snapped. “When you and Rick and the others broke into Woodbury, we didn’t know that Maggie and Glenn were being held hostage. We didn’t know that they tried to kill Michonne. We didn’t know who you all were or why you appeared to be attacking us for no reason. So when the Governor said that you were terrorists living in a nearby prison, that you were demons out to destroy our little fucked up utopia, and that you and Merle were the catalysts for that betrayal, honestly, who were we to think otherwise? All that fear, all that adrenaline: it’s a good combination for panicked decisions.”

He stared at her hard for three long seconds, and she stared right back. She’d raised four boys: a lumberjack, a blacksmith, a Black Ops agent, and an interior designer. No way she was gonna be stared down by this man.

Whatever he was looking for in her expression, he must have found it, because he offered out the bottle of whiskey. She took it without breaking eye contact and took a long swallow from it.

“And it wouldn’t have been the first time he fed us such a line. So who knows how many souls I’ve got to face someday,” she added.

“I know,” he muttered, fidgeting his hands together before looking at her again. “I get it. I still don’t like it.”

“I’m not asking you to like it,” she shook her head. “We don’t gotta be buddies and get matching bracelets or any of that shit. I would just appreciate it if you didn’t treat me like the scum of this Earth every time you saw me in the hallways. I’m a lady, dammit.”

He snorted, and she swore it was the first time she ever saw his face do anything other than a scowl or a glare.

“Y’think that’s funny?”

“Well, you ain’t exactly lady-like,” he mumbled, gesturing to the bottle in her hands.

“Excuse the fucking fuck out of you,” she chimed. “I can be a lady and like my glass bottles like I like my men: tall, dark, and full of whiskey, and I can do all of that without taking lip from you.”

And with that, she saw Daryl tap out of the conversation.

“Right,” he grunted, taking up his crossbow. “Are you actually taking watch or was all that just to have our little kumbaya moment?”

“I’m taking watch,” she nodded to the rifle that she’d set against the wall. “Are we straight here?” She gestured to the space between them.

Daryl frowned, moving toward the door, but looked at her…without the stink-eye this time. “We’re…getting there.”

She raised her bottle in a toast, “I’ll take it. Now scoot, lookin’ at your face makes me want to keep drinking…and I’m a horny drunk.”

He vanished like smoke after that, and she snorted, setting the bottle down and throwing her gaze out to the fence perimeter.

Please, like just half a bottle of whiskey could get Rosemary McLeod drunk.


End file.
